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Close Read: New Crimes for Old

It was easy, this weekend, to mix up the story about how former Vice President Cheney gave the C.I.A. “direct orders” to hide things from Congress with the new revelations about about Cheney’s role in the secret N.S.A. warrantless-wiretapping program (which, it turns out, didn’t even accomplish anything).

And easier still to miss the Times’s look back at the deaths of “hundreds, perhaps thousands” of Afghans who fought with the Taliban and surrendered to the Northern Alliance’s General Abdul Rashid Dostum. He allegedly had some killed by shutting them in containers and letting them suffocate and others by shooting. The Times reports that the United States was reluctant to investigate, because Dostum was “on the payroll of the C.I.A. and his militia worked closely with United States Special Forces.”

The container deaths are not a new story—as the Times acknowledges, it’s a pretty notorious chapter in the war. (Jon Lee Anderson wrote about Dostum’s role in a 2005 New Yorker piece.) The Times has some new details, like this from a former official:

“Somebody mentioned Dostum and the story about the containers and the possibility that this was a war crime,” the official said. “And [Paul] Wolfowitz said we are not going to be going after him for that.”

But there are other reasons why it’s still news now. The first is our maddening collective amnesia about war crimes. Look in the Times’s own pages: on May 17th, in the Book Review, Dostum appears as

a courageous, relatively liberal leader who pulls double duty here by liberating his country and breaking out of the book’s broad-shouldered tough guy mold. Dostum’s a hoot. As he battled toward Mazar, he worked his satellite phone like Jeremy Piven rocking the headset in “Entourage.”

A hoot. We Americans have a terrible weakness for colorful warlords.

The second reason is Guantánamo. The Times notes:

Dell Spry, the F.B.I.’s senior representative at the detainee prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, heard accounts of the deaths from agents he supervised there. Separately, 10 or so prisoners brought from Afghanistan reported that they had been “stacked like cordwood” in shipping containers and had to lick the perspiration off one another to survive.

The Times doesn’t say what’s implicit: some of the prisoners in Guantánamo are there because warlords like Dostum handed them over to us for bounties or for reasons that we may never know. One of the main accusations against Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih, the prisoner who apparently committed suicide last month, was that, after surrendering to the Northern Alliance, he took part in a prison uprising in Dostum’s area. All sorts of crimes are folded into the files in Guantánamo.

Finally—confoundingly—Dostum is now President Hamid Karzai’s military chief of staff. Does that mean that our troops’ lives may depend on the judgement of an alleged war criminal? President Obama now says he wants the container deaths investigated. But it’s not as though Dostum is the only stain on the Karzai government. Today’s Washington Post mentions Karzai’s

pardon of several convicted drug traffickers from an influential tribe, based on what his spokesman said was “respect for their families.”

Are American soldiers dying over the question of who in Afghanistan benefits from the heroin trade? Who, and what, are we fighting for?

Perhaps Tim McCarver and Joe Buck can ask President Obama when he visits the Fox broadcast booth for the All-Star Game tomorrow night. He’ll also throw out the first pitch.

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.